Developers have dealt with copycat games for many years, but generative AI has made it easier than ever to whip up a clone, and that problem has grown in recent years. The developer behind Drunken Goddess Reflux is aware of this, and out of fear that its anime Russian roulette game could be the victim of a cash-grab imitation, it has announced that it has canceled its upcoming public demo. Instead, Alliance Arts will hold closed online play sessions for a limited number of players.
“We sincerely apologize for the short notice to everyone who was looking forward to it,” the developer wrote online. “We’re concerned that the demo’s content could be used to quickly imitate or replicate the game’s presentation and gameplay with AI or other tools, and that such works could be released before our launch.”
Alliance Arts is also concerned that it can’t properly manage restrictions on posting and streaming content from the game, and it’ll instead hand out demo keys and collect feedback for the game through its group Discord. The studio’s fears aren’t unwarranted, with the upcoming Needle in a Haystack being a prime example of Steam’s copycat problem. After the game was announced in August and a clip of its purposefully tedious gameplay went viral–you genuinely are just looking for a needle in a haystack–clones quickly popped up online.
